posted at 10:01 am on May 2, 2014 by Guy Benson

“You can’t ban racism for life. And it’s endemic in our culture. No matter how many times we say we’re gonna have a conversation about race, we never have that conversation.”

Such low-hanging fruit was too much to bear for the folks at Digitas Daily, who’ve produced a quasi-definitive MSNBC “conversations on race” super-cut. Enjoy:

It’s tough to pick favorites among the non-news network’s myriad colloquies on racial issues, though the most nuanced ones often involve fast-talking race hustler Michael Eric Dyson. Who could forget his thoughtful “Jewish Nazi collaborator” analysis of Clarence Thomas’ Voting Rights Act decision? Or the time he dropped the “white privilege” bomb on a conservative guest who dared to challenge his race-baiting? Memories. Here’s the funnest fact about MSNBC-approved “conversations on race:” The act of engaging in them makes one high susceptible to — ta-da! –charges of racism. Those who call most loudly for these discussions are often first up in the queue to denounce people for their unapproved attitudes.* Knee-jerk racial demagoguery is most frequently directed at conservatives, but when there’s an overriding agenda at stake, no one is safe.

*Just for the record, none of this should be construed as an implicit defense of the high-profile actual racists who’ve been in the news recently.

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Both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton got in an enormous amount of trouble over matters that were, honestly speaking, quiet minor. However, where they fell truly afoul of the law, was not the original scandal, but in attempting to cover the sandals up. The scandal that the Obamanation Administration is attempting to cover up, is not a minor misdemeanor breaking and entry, or even a sexual affair with an intern, it’s criminal level negligence. Unlike with either the Nixon or Clinton scandals, where no one died, four people died and the Obamanation Administration has lied and covered up what took place.

The real question now is this. In a nation where the President and the Attorney General are constantly accusing people of being racists, are we going to hold the Obamanation Administration to the same standards that we held Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton to, or are we going to hold Barack Obama to a completely different standard because he is Black, and if we do, would that not constitute the most egregious act of racism?

The media never really talks about the racial issues illustrated by the Sterling tape. They don’t talk about the very real metaphors between collegiate-pro athletes and antebellum slavery. When Donald Sterling said he “gives” his players houses and food, instead of saying that he pays them for their labor, that gets at very deeply embedded ideas about the responsibilities of “the master” and the obligation of “the slave.” When Donald Sterling says that he is concerned about what other people will think if they see his “delicate Latina” in photographs with black men, that gets at very creepy, but also deeply embedded anxieties about the hyper masculinity and hypersexuality of black men, anxieties that are directly related to how we think about the relationship between black people and crime. We don’t think about the fact that Donald Sterling’s diagnosis of the relationship between whiteness, purity and prestige operate in this society.

We aren’t willing to talk about what Donald Sterling meant when he said he’s not racist, “but there’s a culture.” All we want to talk about is “don’t bring them to my games” because that’s an easy allusion to Jim Crow and we can easily condemn it. But there’s so much more happening in the tape that reveals the truth of race in our society. Conservatives and liberals alike are terrified of actually engaging the entire audio and unpacking its implications.

They don’t actually want an honest discussion on race. They want to pummel anyone that dares criticize anything minority.

How about realizing that these high profile cases are more the exception than the rule? But that wouldn’t fit the narrative that 50% of the country (Republicans)is racist. They don’t want an honest discussion, because honestly, that fact is not true and if that gets out, the Democrats number 1 card to play in difficult elections is gone and their hold on power starts to crack.

The media never really talks about the racial issues illustrated by the Sterling tape. They don’t talk about the very real metaphors between collegiate-pro athletes and antebellum slavery. When Donald Sterling said he “gives” his players houses and food, instead of saying that he pays them for their labor, that gets at very deeply embedded ideas about the responsibilities of “the master” and the obligation of “the slave.” When Donald Sterling says that he is concerned about what other people will think if they see his “delicate Latina” in photographs with black men, that gets at very creepy, but also deeply embedded anxieties about the hyper masculinity and hypersexuality of black men, anxieties that are directly related to how we think about the relationship between black people and crime. We don’t think about the fact that Donald Sterling’s diagnosis of the relationship between whiteness, purity and prestige operate in this society.

We aren’t willing to talk about what Donald Sterling meant when he said he’s not racist, “but there’s a culture.” All we want to talk about is “don’t bring them to my games” because that’s an easy allusion to Jim Crow and we can easily condemn it. But there’s so much more happening in the tape that reveals the truth of race in our society. Conservatives and liberals alike are terrified of actually engaging the entire audio and unpacking its implications.

libfreeordie on May 2, 2014 at 10:13 AM

Very real metaphors? Nice job perfesser!

Some old guy who also hates Jews and Christians is also a racist and this has all sorts of meaning for the truth of race in our society?

But there’s so much more happening in the tape that reveals the truth of race in our society. Conservatives and liberals alike are terrified of actually engaging the entire audio and unpacking its implications.

libfreeordie on May 2, 2014 at 10:13 AM

Agreed, we need to do some serious unpacking of these various racist audio bits.

We could start with: “typical white person” and “clean, articulate African American” followed by “white ni**ers”.

Now Sterling is a private citizen and those quotes I provided are from top-shelf, elected representatives of the American people, so what do you think is implied when so many would vote for someone who would say something like that. What does it say about the people who uttered those quotes?

How does “white privilege” explain the illegitimacy, abortion, and murder rates among blacks?

Blacks, in particular, want a conversation only to the extent that they can somehow club you over the head with it.

BuckeyeSam on May 2, 2014 at 10:14 AM

Well you see whites fled to the suburbs taking all the money with them so…of course all the black people left behind resorted to such things. It has nothing to do with the lefts attack on the family in it’s War on Poverty and the sexual revolution. It’s all the white people’s fault.

The conversation on racism has been ongoing since this country was settled.It will go on until the end of time.When the minority become the majority,which is near,they will still call racism at the drop of a hat.Their actions cause many to become racist.

Agreed, we need to do some serious unpacking of these various racist audio bits.

We could start with: “typical white person” and “clean, articulate African American” followed by “white ni**ers”.

Now Sterling is a private citizen and those quotes I provided are from top-shelf, elected representatives of the American people, so what do you think is implied when so many would vote for someone who would say something like that. What does it say about the people who uttered those quotes?

But there’s so much more happening in the tape that reveals the truth of race in our society. Conservatives and liberals alike are terrified of actually engaging the entire audio and unpacking its implications.

libfreeordie on May 2, 2014 at 10:13 AM

It’s very telling that Sterling’s private rant is the epitome of race relations in America but the daily nonsensical rantings on MSNBC and other parts of the media about race aren’t.

Every time you guys screech about “white privilege” (when most if not all of you grew up in upper or upper-middle economic class privilege) or opine about racist dog whistles like “golf”; when Eric Holder and Obama complain that no president or AG have faced such treatment when the previous administration received worse treatment you guys beclown yourself.

So when you come around saying we need to have a conversation about race you’ve already set the table with so much nonsense that you can’t be taken seriously.

So libfree, if a prominent black man who makes his living working as a social justice warrior were to utter something like “NYC is Hymietown” or referred to Jews as “Diamond Merchants”, what do you think that implies about themselves?

If a white man were to say that a black politician would be helped in his election bid because he “doesn’t use a negr0 dialect unless he wants to”, would that imply something about the speaker or the people he represents as a politician himself?

Would you vote for a Party that included those who would utter such phrases, why or why not.

Now Sterling is a private citizen and those quotes I provided are from top-shelf, elected representatives of the American people, so what do you think is implied when so many would vote for someone who would say something like that. What does it say about the people who uttered those quotes?

Bishop on May 2, 2014 at 10:19 AM

I would say that Joe Biden and Harry Reid clearly harbor deeply embedded racist attitudes. What’s hilarious about the “youe party is racist, no YOUR party is racist” game is that it proves that racism doesn’t disqualify you for running for elected office in EITHER party, and thus reveals how deeply embedded anti-black racism is. But thanks for proving my point, I guess.

anxieties that are directly related to how we think about the relationship between black people and crime.

***

libfreeordie on May 2, 2014 at 10:13 AM

You mean those anxieties stemming from statistics reporting that black men commit an overwhelming disproportionate crime in this country? You mean the anxieties that prompted Jesse Jackson to say years ago that on a dark night in Chicago, he’s relieved to find a group of white teens following him rather than a group of black teens?

And let’s be clear. With respect to crime, who’s afraid of blacks in the middle class and up? We’re terrified of lower-class black males age 12 to 35 because they commit so many violent crimes. And to a man, if you ask them whether they think a good education would be of value to them, they’d say no, because that’s acting white.

What’s disturbing is that when an African American tries to speak out about some of the social issues that need to be addressed in the black community, take Bill Cosby for example, he’s attacked. Called names, criticized, shunned. If you’re only willing to accept the positive and not the negative don’t expect to make any progress.

I would say that Joe Biden and Harry Reid clearly harbor deeply embedded racist attitudes. What’s hilarious about the “youe party is racist, no YOUR party is racist” game is that it proves that racism doesn’t disqualify you for running for elected office in EITHER party, and thus reveals how deeply embedded anti-black racism is. But thanks for proving my point, I guess.

libfreeordie on May 2, 2014 at 10:30 AM

Sorry, you confuse racism and mere prejudice. Everyone has some amount of prejudice–it has a wide spectrum. You and other race baiters need to confine racism and bigotry and white supremacy to the very small reservations where they still exist.

aWhy is why there are racist incidents on dozens of college campuses across the country every single year…

libfreeordie on May 2, 2014 at 10:28 AM

Again you can’t be taken seriously on this issue.

Many if not most of these incidents turn out to be fakes. Are there racists in society? Yes. But you’d have us believe that the biggest factors in keeping black people poor is racism when it’s obviously not.

And it’s funny that you’d bring up the college campus – there isn’t a more left wing space in America than the college campus.

But please, lay out for us the top 5 obstacles poor blacks face in getting out of poverty.

And let’s be clear. With respect to crime, who’s afraid of blacks in the middle class and up? We’re terrified of lower-class black males age 12 to 35 because they commit so many violent crimes.

This is the biggest intellectually dishonest myth when justifying anti-black attitudes. Even though lower class black males commit more crime than other groups, the vast majority of black men aged 12-35 aren’t criminals. Like, the VAST majority. So if you are “afraid of blacks” it is because you are willfully ignoring math and the law of averages. And that’s what racism is, an irrational anxiety about a part of a group that extends to how one thinks about the entire group. So yes, you are racist BuckeyeSam. Congrats! And black people can hold anti-black views…

I would say that Joe Biden and Harry Reid clearly harbor deeply embedded racist attitudes. What’s hilarious about the “youe party is racist, no YOUR party is racist” game is that it proves that racism doesn’t disqualify you for running for elected office in EITHER party, and thus reveals how deeply embedded anti-black racism is. But thanks for proving my point, I guess.

libfreeordie on May 2, 2014 at 10:30 AM

Again, name the top 5 obstacles poor blacks face in getting out of poverty.

I would say that Joe Biden and Harry Reid clearly harbor deeply embedded racist attitudes. What’s hilarious about the “youe party is racist, no YOUR party is racist” game is that it proves that racism doesn’t disqualify you for running for elected office in EITHER party, and thus reveals how deeply embedded anti-black racism is. But thanks for proving my point, I guess.

libfreeordie on May 2, 2014 at 10:30 AM

Somehow you missed the “typical white person” quote so I posted it again, what does it say about the person who uttered it, presumably that they have deeply a embedded racist attitude too, yes? I mean racism is racism. You’ll want to concentrate on the “white” word in the quote, it has nothing to do with being anti-black, you agree?

Now the question is: Would you vote for such people? Seriously, I doubt you would pull the lever for Donald Sterling purely because of his racism were he to run for office.

1. The War on Drugs
2. The War on Drugs
3. The War on Drugs
4. The War on Drugs
5. The War on Drugs.

libfreeordie on May 2, 2014 at 10:39 AM

And that’s not racist. Yeah I know what your response is going to be but you’re wrong. The drug laws are not racist. They also hurt poor whites.

But I do agree with you that the war on drugs has been a big waste and does cause obstacles. I’d probably even throw it in the top 5 but it’s not the most important issue. The disintegration of the poor and lower-middle class family is THE biggest issue. If that one problem were solved then every other issue would take care of itself.

Somehow you missed the “typical white person” quote so I posted it again, what does it say about the person who uttered it, presumably that they have deeply a embedded racist attitude too, yes? I mean racism is racism. You’ll want to concentrate on the “white” word in the quote, it has nothing to do with being anti-black, you agree?

Now the question is: Would you vote for such people? Seriously, I doubt you would pull the lever for Donald Sterling purely because of his racism were he to run for office.

Bishop on May 2, 2014 at 10:41 AM

If there’s something racist about Obama saying that the “typical white person” has heard and internalized negative ideas about black people, then there’s something racist about saying the sky is blue. You even have BuckeyeSam saying that exact thing on this very thread, you have Donald Sterling describing those kinds of attitudes as simply “the culture” that “we live in.”

I think people are confused about Donald Sterling’s rant. Yes he’s a racist, and yes he made a racist demand on his girlfriend. But when he described the world we live in, he was 100% correct. What part of his claims about white supremacy are wrong?

I’ll confess to some amount of prejudice when it comes to lower-class young blacks. I won’t confess to racism. Never.

One thing that confounds me in life is the lack of value that some people place in an education. I’m not talking about all people getting into college. I’m talking about an overwhelming number of children abiding by the discipline to march through K-12 in an effort to learn how to read, write, perform mathematical functions, and understand some basic science so that they can then function in society as adults.

With whites, ignorance of the value of education now seem limited to areas like Appalachia. I’m sure there are pockets elsewhere. By and large, however, whites seem to understand the value of education. Upper class and middle class black seem to value education as well. But from my experience tutoring in an inner-city middle school (half a day a week for three and a half school years last decade), I’m convinced that lower-class blacks simply don’t value education and don’t see it as a ticket to a better life. This is a problem that only black adults can fix. And until they do so, lower-class blacks will continue to screw themselves.

They are paid the fair market value for their labor. They freely enter into contracts for employment and are free to work for others.

Sterling may have the mentality that he’s running a plantation and that he’s giving these players everything they have but that doesn’t make it real.

And you’ve just uttered the most racist thing in this thread. YOU are the one who just posited that all the black players in the NBA are in fact only getting paid vast sums because of the magnanimity of their plantation owners and not because they provide a product/service valued by society.

*Just for the record, none of this should be construed as an implicit defense of the high-profile actual racists who’ve been in the news recently.

Frankly, I no longer give a damn about those ‘high profile racists.’ 40 years ago, sure. Not any more. Not for a long time.

The racist poison in our society today is not the dying old farts like Sterling. It’s MSNBC and its ilk. They never see an issue they don’t stridently demand be defined in terms of race. All black Americans are ‘oppressed,’ and all white Americans are ‘oppressors.’

If there’s something racist about Obama saying that the “typical white person” has heard and internalized negative ideas about black people, then there’s something racist about saying the sky is blue. You even have BuckeyeSam saying that exact thing on this very thread, you have Donald Sterling describing those kinds of attitudes as simply “the culture” that “we live in.”

Ah, well, good to know that the black Dog Eater has the “typical” white person all figured out. I wonder how you would feel if Preznit Caucasian were to say “You know, the typical black person feels this way….”, I get the feeling your reaction wouldn’t be quite as understanding.

Some look actually noteworthy. But the cite conflates real incidents with blacks whining about mistreatment. The December 2013 University of Cincinnati “incident” is a crock. The guy was a mediocre dean, so the university decided to do something about it.

I’ll confess to some amount of prejudice when it comes to lower-class young blacks. I won’t confess to racism. Never.

And there you have it ladies and gentleman, the cognitive dissonance at the heart of American racism. You admit that you will evaluate people based upon their race and socio-economic background but you refused the label “racist.” Notice, Donald Sterling made the exact same move. He constantly denied that he was a racist, while making a series of clearly racist statements.

Here’s the thing. The civil rights movement managed to convince the nation that being “a racist” was akin to being “a deviant” or even “a criminal” hence hate crime laws and the like. What has resulted then, is a world where people are more interested in not being called “a racist” than actually interrogating whether their attitudes are rational and logical, and whether their attitudes, if put into practice in corporate or government produce negative outcomes for innocent people. It’s all about the label. As long as I can create a large enough consensus (or buy off the NAACP) that says “I’m not a racist” then I don’t have to think critically about my ideas. So the conservative movement and blogs like this produce part of that project. In this space everyone tells themselves again and again “I’m not a racist, you’re not a racist, none of us are racist.” And once you’ve convinced yourself that you are not “a” racist, then that’s the end of the conversation.

Here’s how I teach it to students. I often will ask “do you believe that a member of the Klan never helped a neighbor? Watched a friend’s kid? Aided someone in need? Taught an elementary school class?” Etc. The point is that racism *ISN’T* antithetical to someone being a good person and an upstanding member of the community. Because racism is ultimately about the organization of resources, and ensuring that one’s own community succeeds and others do not. It is a basic part of human existence, and always has been.

We are smart enough to overcome it, but we have to totally change how we think about and talk about it. We have to delink it from a moral accusation and instead, think about and unpack the ways that it is naturalized in, as Donald Sterling says “a culture.”

To believe that the War on Drugs isn’t about race is to put your head in the sand. It has *always* been about race in this country. Or are we forgetting Anslinger?

libfreeordie on May 2, 2014 at 10:47 AM

Have racists been involved in the drug war? Sure, that’s not a stretch but you’re claiming it’s some grand conspiracy constructed and kept in place for decades and for generations by liberals, conservatives, Democrats and Republicans at a national and local level just to keep the black man down. That’s nuts.

America also tried prohibition and that wasn’t racist. American’s have a history of trying to control such substances. Have some racists done something with this? That’s possible but in the main the war on drugs is not motivated by racism and is not an institution or effort with racist goals.

Are you seriously going to argue that the biggest obstacles to decriminalizing marijuana are entrenched racism? You’ve gone off the deep end.

MSNBC panelist: I wish we’d finally man up and have a conversation about race

I was just about to move on with life…..

But they just won’t drop it…

Electrongod on May 2, 2014 at 10:05 AM

It’s all that the left has to hang on to power. They are bankrupt philosophically. In order to hold on to power, they must portray the electorate into victims and victimizers. It’s patently evil but the low-information voter and the press let’s them get away with it.

When someone can’t get past the color of the largest organ, it makes me wonder what other things they can’t get past? It is a pigment, nothing more. Some people have more pigment than others, that is it.

Attitude, a lack of some education, and ignorance is what the problem is, and will always be.

…And let’s be clear. With respect to crime, who’s afraid of blacks in the middle class and up? We’re terrified of lower-class black males age 12 to 35 because they commit so many violent crimes. And to a man, if you ask them whether they think a good education would be of value to them, they’d say no, because that’s acting white.

BuckeyeSam on May 2, 2014 at 10:31 AM

.
This is the biggest intellectually dishonest myth when justifying anti-black attitudes.

libfreeordie on May 2, 2014 at 10:35 AM

.B S . . . . . Barbra Streisand…

This is the “justification” of FEAR … of being in a poor, urban environment, that is predominantly populated by “descendents of slaves”.
.

So if you are “afraid of blacks” it is because you are willfully ignoring math and the law of averages. And that’s what racism is, an irrational anxiety about a part of a group that extends to how one thinks about the entire group.

libfreeordie on May 2, 2014 at 10:35 AM

.
I don’t believe we are “afraid of blacks”, and that’s NOT the definition of “racism”.

See definition above:

listens2glenn on May 2, 2014 at 10:35 AM

.

So yes, you are racist BuckeyeSam. Congrats! And black people can hold anti-black views…

You are full of it. I don’t need your crock. When I tutored black kids and watched a handful of kids who were trying to get a decent education get ridiculed for “acting white,” I learned all I needed to know. I can’t help noticing a black person is black because they’re black. But as I do with every one else, I wait to hear what comes out of their mouths before deciding anything about them.

Because racism is ultimately about the organization of resources, and ensuring that one’s own community succeeds and others do not. It is a basic part of human existence, and always has been.

We are smart enough to overcome it, but we have to totally change how we think about and talk about it. We have to delink it from a moral accusation and instead, think about and unpack the ways that it is naturalized in, as Donald Sterling says “a culture.”

libfreeordie on May 2, 2014 at 10:55 AM

Ha ha ha. And you accuse BuckeyeSam of a lack of self-awareness?

You’ve just described the operating principle of the left for the last 100+ years.

And you bring the typical marxist misunderstanding to the economy and culture to top it off. Classic.

This is the biggest intellectually dishonest myth when justifying anti-black attitudes. Even though lower class black males commit more crime than other groups, the vast majority of black men aged 12-35 aren’t criminals. Like, the VAST majority. So if you are “afraid of blacks” it is because you are willfully ignoring math and the law of averages. And that’s what racism is, an irrational anxiety about a part of a group that extends to how one thinks about the entire group. So yes, you are racist BuckeyeSam. Congrats! And black people can hold anti-black views…

libfreeordie on May 2, 2014 at 10:35 AM

Good lord that is moronic.

The “law of averages” also says you will most likely not get mugged at 3AM in Bed Sty. Though common sense says you don’t go there.

I don’t recall anyone cribbing math to determine crime and how they act accordingly.

In less than 30 minutes you went from some pseudo-serious “race conversation” to declaring the liberal mantra “you are a racist because…”

I don’t need anyone to depict my life experience, common sense and ability to chose wisely; even if you and your ilk call everyone a racist. As long as blacks don’t want white guys like me in the conversation – good luck with the stellar results in America over the past 40 years.

So if you are “afraid of blacks” it is because you are willfully ignoring math and the law of averages. And that’s what racism is, an irrational anxiety about a part of a group that extends to how one thinks about the entire group. So yes, you are racist BuckeyeSam. Congrats! And black people can hold anti-black views…

libfreeordie on May 2, 2014 at 10:35 AM

From a study on gun violence in Chicago. But could easily be extrapolated to any large city.

A little while back, I wrote something on the research of Andrew Papachristos, a Yale sociologist not long out of Chicago, on the small social networks of Chicago homicide. In short, how much of fatal violence in Chicago is contained within a comparatively small group of people, who are themselves linked by crime.

It was a fascinating paper, but it had its limitations. Chicago has high raw numbers of homicides and a relatively high homicide rate. But statistically speaking, homicides are a small sample of violence in the city, and in some respects a random one. Recently, Papachristos followed up with a new investigation, and a much larger new data set: non-fatal gunshot injuries in the city.

The data in the new paper is equally fascinating, and on one level, as you might expect, quite troubling. To begin with, the dramatic disparities the rates of nonfatal gunshot injury: overall it’s 46.5 per 100,000 for the city as a whole from 2006-2012. It’s 1.62 per 100,000 for whites; 28.72 for Hispanics, and 112.83 for blacks.

For all males, it’s 44.68 per 100,000; 239.77 for black males, and for black males from 18-34 it’s 599.65. As Papachristos and co-authors Christopher Wildeman and Elizabeth Roberto point out, that’s a staggering one in 200.

The numbers are enormous, and they’ve caused a lot of pessimism. But the point of digging into the data is to create, literally, maps—to follow the violence through the city and, as maps are meant to do, guide us back to its sources. And in that sense, cohesive patterns emerge.

Papachristos constructs a social network—not a virtual one in the Facebook sense, but a real one of social connections between people—by looking at arrestees who have been arrested together. That turns out to be a lot of people in raw numbers, almost 170,000 people with a “co-offending tie” to one another, with an average age of 25.7 years, 78.6 percent male and 69.5 percent black. It’s also a large percentage of all the individuals arrested: 40 percent of all the individuals arrested during that period.

Within the entire group, the largest component of that whole co-offender group has 107,740 people.

Within the timeframe—from 2006 to 2010—70 percent of all shootings in Chicago, or about 7,500 out of over 10,000, are contained within all the co-offending networks. And 89 percent of those shootings are within the largest component.

Or, to put another way: the rate of gunshot victimization (nonfatal + fatal) in Chicago is 62.1 per 100k. Within a co-offending network, it’s 740.5—more than 10 times higher.

Now what’s the percentage of the black population in Chicago? What’s the black male 18-34 population?

If you wanna get rid of racism, stop subsidizing it. Bar every university with racially structured departments and curricula from government funding. Its a good start to diminish the most anti-social racial demagogues.

We are smart enough to overcome it, but we have to totally change how we think about and talk about it. We have to delink it from a moral accusation and instead, think about and unpack the ways that it is naturalized in, as Donald Sterling says “a culture.”

They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk: Why you ain’t, Where you is, What he drive, Where he stay, Where he work, Who you be… And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk.

Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. In fact you will never get any kind of job making a decent living.

People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we’ve got these knuckleheads walking around. The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids. $500 sneakers for what? And they won’t spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics.

I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18 and how come you didn’t know that he had a pistol? And where is the father? Or who is his father?

People putting their clothes on backward: Isn’t that a sign of something gone wrong? People with their hats on backward, pants down around the crack, isn’t that a sign of something? Or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up? Isn’t it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up and got all type of needles [piercing] going through her body?

What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don’t know a thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap, and all of them are in jail.

Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem. We have got to take the neighborhood back. People used to be ashamed. Today a woman has eight children with eight different ‘husbands’ — or men or whatever you call them now. We have millionaire football players who cannot read. We have million-dollar basketball players who can’t write two paragraphs. We as black folks have to do a better job. Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us. We have to start holding each other to a higher standard.

By the way, Libfree, when I was volunteering at a soup kitchen monthly for five years ago last decade (my nickname was the Ice Man because I always made sure to bring lots of ice because the site’s ice machine stunk), I’m pretty confident that my car was vandalized and my collection of CDs was stolen by some of your solid citizens. My only revenge is that I doubt they enjoyed James Taylor, Kenny G, Peanuts Christmas, and the like.

Most of what Donald Sterling said reflected an accurate diagnosis of the way race operates in our society. He’s old and crotchety and has a creepy voice and the things he said upset our sensibilities enormously. But his analysis of “the culture?” Accurate.